The Story of the Cannibal Woman

by Maryse Conde

  Professionally speaking, Stephen was right. Rosélie had no qualifications to teach. A classroom is a bit like a circus arena in which the lion tamer risks being devoured by his cubs at any moment. Rosélie, however, had no intention of taming anyone. She tolerated everything, imposed nothing, and thus liberated their creativity. Furthermore, as she had never known how to use words, she listened. For hours on end, sitting in her tiny office after class, she was almost carried away by the torrent of students’ stories. Mothers battered by depraved husbands. Sisters drawn and quartered. Brothers robbing, raping, and murdering. Cousins dead from an overdose. Or else their bodies riddled with bullets by the police or rival gangs. Young boys and girls just out of prison or detoxification centers. Orphans killing themselves to feed their siblings. A fifteen-year-old taking care of her handicapped parents all on her own. By comparison her life seemed privileged. Even the quarrels between Rose and her Don Juan of a husband paled in comparison. Insipid. Despite her low regard for literature, she was dying to put these dramatic tales on paper and submit them to a major publishing house on the Left Bank, thus revealing the other side of the American Dream, the distress and abject misery hidden under the clichés: “the most powerful nation in the world” or “the triumph of democracy.” But they would accuse her of exaggerating and lapsing into pessimism and despair.

  People prefer schmaltzy stories. Exotic tales from the Caribbean. Once-upon-a-time stories. Spicy perfumes.

  Life is marvelous. If you haven’t noticed, you haven’t hung your plow upon a star. Arab proverb!

  In short, it wasn’t long before the students at La América, like its director, were conquered by their new mistress.

  “Love, the only love that exists,” wrote André Breton. “Carnal love, I adore, I’ve never stopped adoring your poisonous shadow, your fatal shadow.”

  Rosélie and Ariel made love every day after classes in the Turret of the Raving Mad. I leave it up to you to imagine the scene.

  This lasted a month, six months, perhaps a year. They lost track of time.

  One morning—the memory of it shut out by her conscience still haunted her—this guilty happiness came to an end. Very suddenly. It was winter: a winter of ice and frost common to New York. The voracious beast had blown down from Canada, leaving a whirlwind of snow in its wake. It had frozen at dawn and the slippery crust on the sidewalks glistened in the timid morning sun. Wrapped up to their eyes, passersby groped their way along. At La América, students and teachers were crowded in the yard. The amazing news was on everyone’s lips: Ariel had been arrested.

  The pigs had picked him up at dawn. They accused him of having ties with drug dealers and laundering money on their behalf. La América was closed. Classes suspended.

  Rosélie collapsed into the arms of Stephen, who once again said not a word of reproach.

  What can passion be compared to? To a hurricane, David, Hugo, or Belinda, that swoops down on the island and ravages it entirely. There is nothing you can do about a hurricane except wait for its fury to pass. And that’s what he had done. He had tried to warn her, to whisper that Ariel was a shady character. But had she been listening? Rosélie’s chagrin was mixed with a feeling of humiliation. So she had fallen for a crook, one of those petty criminals that America produces by the thousand, a crony of Manuel Noriega’s. The papers are full of their pitiful exploits. Because of him, she had hurt the best of men, the most perfect of companions. For although Stephen hadn’t breathed a word, it was obvious he had suffered. He who was so fussy about his appearance, maniacal to the point of ironing his shirts himself and sending a suit back to the cleaners three times because of a crease in the trousers, now wore a shapeless pullover and a wrinkled pair of jeans. His hair curled down over his collar. His face was gaunt and haggard. He hadn’t written one line or given a paper for months. He skipped through his classes.

  Fina asserted just the opposite. While struggling to keep her weight down along the frozen paths of Riverside Park, she maintained that Ariel was an idealist, crazy about Art, with his head in the clouds. It basically boiled down to a political conspiracy. The State Department had wanted to destroy La América, a den of subversion. As for his swinging both ways, that was pure slander. Dozens of beauties could honestly swear that Ariel was a lover of women. Despite all her efforts, she couldn’t manage to convince Rosélie to take the train to a prison in upstate New York. It’s in B movies that lovers exchange tearful looks through the glass of the visiting room.

  Ariel was freed after three months. No charge could be held against him. La América’s books were in order. Its respected donors included a Saudi prince, a Kuwaiti, and a descendant of Winston Churchill.

  The Center reopened its doors. But the enthusiasm had gone. Teachers and students alike had fled. In the empty classrooms there remained only a dozen students and two teachers: a Spanish anarchist, master in the technique of azulejos, and a Japanese communist, enamored of Gothic painting.

  Using Fina as a go-between, Ariel sent Rosélie a series of enigmatic and passionate letters begging her not to confuse those who adored her with those who used her as a screen. She didn’t answer. Not that she didn’t love him anymore. On the contrary, when she thought of him, her entire being melted. Water poured from every part and every orifice of her body. And then she couldn’t stop dreaming of the world they had hoped to build at La América. A world enamored of Art, diversity, and tolerance. Nobody would have to shoulder a prefabricated identity any longer, like a deadly garrote strangling the neck. A black woman could curl up in peace beside her white man. But the idea of hurting Stephen was unbearable. Never again. She’d rather die.

  This enraged Fina.

  “You’re sacrificing yourself for nothing! For nothing!” she maintained.

  For nothing?

  “Is it Stephen you’re calling nothing?” she choked each time Fina said it.

  Fina was seething, but didn’t answer.

  One afternoon, beside herself, she stopped dead in the middle of the park and began yelling at all the echoes:

  “Yes! Your Stephen is de la mierda. Do you hear me? De la mierda!”

  As a good Latina, Fina had accustomed Rosélie to cut-and-dried expressions such as coño, carajo, and other curse words. But the friendship between the two women was unable to survive this one. They stopped seeing each other. Shortly afterward, Fina slammed the door on the university and went back to Venezuela, where she made a name for herself as a moviemaker. She made an autobiographical film of her childhood as an alienated bourgeois. Her only link with the people was her black grandmother, who was a magician and storyteller. About the same time, Ariel, in a more somber mood, retired to a plot of land inherited from his parents in Jérémie. The only access was by boat. It was an arid and bare piece of land where only columnar and hedge cactus grew. At night their gangling shapes could be taken for silhouettes of the dead who often wandered around in the dark. In Haiti, such things surprise no one. They call it marvelous realism. See René Depestre. Ariel tried to re-create an art school on the lines of La América. Unfortunately, in this famished country, people are ravenous for dollars. Unable to muster any volunteer teachers, he had to close the school. He ended up marrying Anthénor, pet name Sonore, the peasant woman who cooked him his pork griot and sweet potato bread. He gave her nine children, three of whom died as infants.

  THIRTEEN

  Every couple who goes through a crisis imagines that travel will provide a miracle cure. That’s what they call an idée reçue. They believe that seeing new landscapes, meeting new people, and learning a foreign language is an infallible cure for their distress. Stephen and Rosélie were no different. In early summer, Stephen proposed they leave. Europe? Africa? Asia? He himself was in favor of Japan. For a long time Fumio had given him the desire to know this country, a little more than by the sushi bars in Soho or the Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes, which he had read dozens of times.

  Rosélie refused, still smarting from her wounds to risk
curious or racist looks flung full in her face or as a stab in the back. Despite Stephen’s loathing for the beach, a stay in Montauk on Long Island had to make do. Montauk is what the East Coast has that is closest to a village. No movie theater. A drugstore where sleeping pills are shelved side by side with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Wooden houses strung out along miles of beach. The ocean and the sky stretching to infinity. In Rosélie’s eyes, the sea at Montauk, like the English Channel, had nothing in common with that coquette with green eyes who, picking up her lace petticoats, sashays into the bays of Guadeloupe or seethes against its reefs. It was dull and lifeless, strewn here and there with tufts of foam clinging to her colorless garb. Nothing elating. Swimming was anything but exhilarating.

  Whereas she had trouble getting over Ariel, La América, and the sound and fury of adultery, Stephen recovered extremely quickly and extremely well. He had become friends with a group of rugged men wearing yellow oilskins and sou’westers who initiated him in deep-sea fishing. Every morning he would get up at dawn and return in the evening loaded with swordfish and marlin that slowly decomposed in the fridge, since Rosélie had always loathed fish and its tasteless, anemic, strong-smelling flesh. When he was not out at sea, he would go and drink mugs of beer at the local tavern with his newfound friends. We must admit that, to his credit, unlike his companions he never got drunk, and came home around midnight, fully sober and not bawling “My Funny Valentine.”

  One day a brunette, her pretty face crowned by a powder puff of curly hair, called out to Rosélie over the hedge and proposed they go for a swim. The invitation stunned her, especially as the other holidaymakers carefully avoided her. At the supermarket they would go out of their way not to find themselves in front of the basmati rice shelf at the same time as her. The stranger was called Amy Cohen, her husband, Caleb. They had three sons. They were Jews.

  What is a Jew? Jean-Paul Sartre posed the question in Anti-Semite and Jew. Did he answer the question? Like every teenager, Rosélie had received The Diary of Anne Frank as a birthday present together with Wuthering Heights. She had read Emily Brontë’s tale over and over again, much to Rose’s surprise, since she could never get Rosélie interested in a novel, but she had never opened the Anne Frank. During endless discussions by Stephen and his colleagues, she had heard some maintain the Jews were victims turned perpetrators, while others claimed they were victims fighting for their survival. She was certain of one thing, though: they wore the yellow star as a mark of their singularity and exclusion, like her. Amy described to her journeys that, although they hadn’t taken place in the hold of a slave ship, were nevertheless wrenching experiences. Fleeing fires and pogroms, hunted from one Central European country to another, her family had stopped in Vienna long enough for her grandfather, who was a violinist, to play in Aïda for the inauguration of the Wiener Staatsoper. Then they were on the run again. This time, for safety’s sake, they had crossed the ocean and taken refuge in America. But that was where any resemblance to the naked migrants Rosélie knew, stopped. Amy’s father had invented a fake mother-of-pearl for making shirt buttons that had made him rich. In a just twist of fortune his sons preferred music to shirt buttons, and the five boys played in the various city orchestras. Only Amy had decided to devote her life to her family. She left university without graduating, and ever since, her days were reduced to mashing vegetables into puree, filling babies’ bottles with bottled water, and getting rid of foul-smelling diapers.

  “Motherhood is the noblest of functions,” she would say, up to her eyes in poop. “Alas, ever since the feminists, it has been discredited. It makes me furious!”

  Rosélie, usually not very bold, was bold enough to come out with Stephen’s famous axiom: “The most beautiful creations are those of the imagination.” Amy’s children, in fact, scared her. Three famished, howling children like vultures gorging on their mother’s liver and entrails. Unperturbed, Amy smiled.

  “If I’m going to be devoured, I prefer it to be by my children.”

  Did she mean Rosélie was being devoured by Stephen?

  On weekends the men did not set out to sea. Grandparents, parents, and friends streamed in from New York. The city dwellers’ cars jammed the streets while the tavern was always full. One Sunday Amy invited Rosélie and Stephen to lunch. Aaron, her youngest brother, with a mane of hair like Beethoven on the box sets of his complete symphonies, had just played Gustav Mahler in Paris and, together with his wife, Rebecca, had been horrified by the anti-Semitism of the French. What a terrible lot! Not surprising they produced a Drieu La Rochelle, Brasillach, Vichy, and Papon! Everyone had an anecdote to tell. The atmosphere became openly Francophobe.

  “During the last war, guess what all the French soldiers wanted to learn in German?” Aaron asked.

  “….”

  “‘I surrender!’ They all wanted to say ‘I surrender!’”

  As a rule, Stephen was the first to jeer at the French, but he liked nothing better than to sow dissension. In the midst of a chorus of laughter, he declared:

  “I could turn Sartre’s phrase round at you. Instead of ‘It’s the anti-Semite who makes the Jew,’ ‘It’s the Jew who makes the anti-Semite.’”

  Following a deathly silence, there was a general outcry. Stephen reveled in the effect he had produced and persisted.

  “It’s the same with Rosélie. Her individualistic behavior provokes a reaction. She then interprets it from a perspective she has fixed in advance.”

  Even Caleb, an overworked obstetrician, who only turned up at Montauk on weekends, stopped dozing in the sun beside his sons and came to join in the conversation. Amy was the shrillest of them all.

  “Do you mean to say that racism doesn’t exist?” she exclaimed.

  His eyes gleaming, a stray lock of hair across his forehead, Stephen was in his element.

  “That’s not what I mean. Because American society is segregated, still today, even in New York, whatever they like to say, most whites, without being racist, feel a deep malaise in the company of a black person, and are extremely uncomfortable in their presence. The black has to be reassuring…”

  The outcry turned into a racket. Everyone protested at the same time.

  “Reassuring!” Amy shouted. “You’re asking the victims to reassure the perpetrators!”

  “Reassuring! What are they afraid of?” Caleb asked.

  “You have just given the exact definition of racism!” screamed Aaron. “For the white man, the black is not a human being like himself.”

  Rosélie had been hearing this from Stephen for years. Every time she complained about his colleagues, the waiters in a restaurant, or the local shopkeepers, he made an excuse for their behavior and put the blame on her. She intimidated them by her aloofness, she disconcerted them by her silences. She didn’t laugh at their jokes.

  “Smile!” he begged her. “You are so lovely when you smile. They’ll be so charmed they’ll be eating out of your hand.”

  How can you smile at someone who doesn’t see you? Invisible woman.

  The discussion was interrupted for lunch to sample the pièce de résistance, the goulash. It smoldered again over Mocha Java coffee, then flared up with the liqueurs, a Poire Williams and a Courvoisier cognac Aaron had brought back from Paris. For although France was a haven for anti-Semites, it still remained a paradise for fine eating. It finally went out when the visitors got back in their cars and left for New York. The next morning, lying beside her on the beach, Amy let slip her first criticism of Stephen, a prelude to many others.

  “I don’t know how you can put up with such an insensitive man!”

  Stephen, insensitive? Provocative, yes. He loved being politically incorrect.

  During that particular vacation Rosélie did an oil painting, six feet by nine, that she called quite simply The Sea at Montauk. It was an infinite variety of grays. Caleb and Amy fell in love with it and bought it from her for several hundred dollars.

  The reader who merely recites from a geo
graphy manual that New York is divided into five boroughs hasn’t a clue that Brooklyn, in fact, is another country, a continent in miniature. You reach it across a bridge, a lasso thrown from the high towers of finance, making a perfect arc over the barges on the river, finally anchoring onto the pillars of a freeway. The nature lover can lose himself in its miles of parks; the art lover can visit its museums. The visitor who is tired of eating beef, cheese, and other burgers, the unsavory culinary inventions of Caucasians without a palate, can burn his tongue in the cheap Jamaican eating houses and exchange his pints of insipid beer for a Bacardi or, even better, a five-star Barbancourt rum. You will find Latino-Americans, Caribbean-Americans, Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans. Few Americans without a hyphen. It is the realm of the Haitians and the Hassidic Jews.

  The Cohens lived in Crown Heights in an old twelve-room house, surrounded by a garden, a genuine park of rare trees, inherited from Caleb’s father, a wealthy trader gone home to confront the suicide attacks in Israel. The relaxed atmosphere of the neighborhood, where in the summer Amy would jog without a bra in a tiny pair of shorts and the children would play unsupervised in the garden and Caleb would walk back from the hospital at any hour of the night, had been dearly won. A few years earlier it had been the scene of some of the worst racial rioting. As a result, New York, even the entire country, had been almost swallowed up in an apocalypse of hatred. Then they had buried the dead. Wept. The purification of mourning had restored peace. Back to being themselves, everyone tried to live in harmony with their black, Jewish, or Asian neighbors.

  Twice a week, Rosélie took the subway to Brooklyn.

  It’s a well-known fact that the New York subway is unlike any other. It’s an Ali Baba’s treasure trove of violence and stench. Those whose heart is hanging on by a thread should be warned not to venture down there! Nutcases shove unsuspecting passengers under trains entering the station in a rattle of iron loud enough to deafen the deaf. Weirdos playing with knives can slash your face. Bums, junkies, and perverts have set up home there. Some of them beg in a tone of voice once used by criminals when they demanded your money or your life. Others exhibit sores and other disabilities to turn your stomach. Yet others shout the end of America is nigh, collapsing under the weight of its mortal sins. The reason why Rosélie braved so many dangers was that Amy’s company brought her infinite happiness. In her presence she rediscovered the forgotten sensation of being a person, a human being, unique, remarkable, perhaps created in God’s image. She was no longer an invisible woman. Amy showed interest in her, in her painting, her hopes, and her failings. When they were running together in the park, Rosélie revealed her wounds: those that endure forever, those that fester, and those that never heal. Amy, who had just admitted her incontinent and bedridden mother to a home for the elderly and hadn’t the courage to visit her, could understand Rosélie, since she was living the torment she herself had once lived.